Shorts, 2/23.

By David Hudson on 02/23/2009

"My friend Michael Brennan is a painter and instructor of color theory at Pratt Institute." Damon Smith has posted "an annotated list Michael distributed to his students about the use of color in film. I like the way he's organized it in terms of contrasts, specifically, and find his epigrammatic notes on Ford, Ray, Powell, and others not just insightful, but fascinating, too, as a window onto a working artist's way of seeing."

The three Salvador Dalí biopics in the works "reveal just how much Hollywood has succumbed to a newfound 'Dalímania' two decades after the painter's death," writes Jerome Taylor in the Independent.

"Read an online review of 'Rashomon' and it's a good bet the Woodcutter's walk will be mentioned," notes Pacze Moj, "with special emphasis on its vaguely-defined technical polish (and, as you'll find in Roger Ebert's review, the precise breaking of one 'taboo': shooting into the sun) and the mesmerizing power it has on the viewer. But let's take a closer look..." Also in The Auteurs' Notebook, David Phelps: "For so many reasons, 'El' is a wonderful movie, a dry-run for Buñuel's masterpiece of on-again off-again passion and sense (Buñuel, like Lubitsch, is always wondering which one is worse), 'That Obscure Object of Desire.' The problem, probably the greatest a film could have, is that 'Vertigo' does it better."

The debut issue Cargo, the new magazine in German on "Film / Media / Culture," appeared on February 5 and features a piece on "Milk" by Michael Sicinski which now appears in the original English at the site: "[Gus] Van Sant and [Dustin Lance] Black have completely elided the Stonewall Riots, the actual birth of the American gay rights movement and the foundation for everything Milk was able to accomplish. (This omission is like profiling Abraham Lincoln and leaving out the Civil War.) Would an acknowledgement of this crucial historical fact somehow undermine Harvey Milk's singularity or greatness? Of course not, but it would depend on a vision of historical action that is dialectical and materialist, reliant not on the cult of personality but on what brave human beings achieve with the circumstances they've got."

"While [Ian] Burns's use of open assemblage and a dispersed and often incomplete cinematic apparatus shows similarities to [Anthony] McCall and [Ken] Jacobs's paracinema, there is nothing comparable to their critique of aestheticism," writes Tim Stott. "What is more, the apparent disclosure of apparatus does little to dispel the illusion of the fictions it creates. To know how we are fooled is not sufficient reason not to be fooled again."

Also in the new issue of frieze, Mia Jankowicz: "Perhaps [Matthew Noel-Tod's] 'Blind Carbon Copy's' central question is: how can a film that uses heavy representations of abstract forms not fail its own attempts to reach such a state? A good question, with a fittingly long and scrambled answer."

Kirsty Bell on the work of Deborah Ligorio: "Film's authority as a medium that preserves a place in time is complicated by the spoken narrative, in which trains of thoughts are strung out or abruptly dropped. The image ceases to represent just itself, but refracts through various symbolic suggestions in time with the artist's spoken reverie."

And Mark Bolland reviews Michael Fried's "Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before" ("The patient reader is amply rewarded as arguments build and unfold") and associate editor Dan Fox asks, "What does it mean to be a professional artist?"

David Bordwell is pleased to read Pete Kozachik, Director of Photography on "Coraline," discussing depth cues in American Cinematographer.

"Defamer Folds Into Gawker; Editors to Pursue Careers in Bearded Hip-Hop."

With a primer on the French New Wave, Scott Tobias launches a new feature at the AV Club: "Gateway to Geekery."

"Few could have imagined the impact 'Godzilla: King of the Monsters' would have had when it was released here in 1956, but a half-century later it's the most important foreign film in American history," argues Jason Notte at the Huffington Post.

Marilyn Ferdinand on "The Organizer" (1963): "[Mario] Monicelli, best known worldwide for his comic caper 'Big Deal on Madonna Street,' has a deft hand for both the fine details and broad strokes of comedy and uses them to flesh out a story that in other hands has been told with tragic seriousness."

The AV Club lists "22 crucial film cadavers (no zombies allowed)."

Online viewing tip. "Fallon's latest ad for Sony Bravia launches today," notes Eliza, who's got it at Creative Review. "The spot features the enormous Bravia-drome, the world's biggest ever zoetrope (as verified by the Guinness Book of Records no less).... The zoetrope has been causing a stir online for the last couple of months, with Sony posting films of it in action on YouTube while the ad was being created."

Online viewing tips. At DC's, "David Ehrenstein presents... Kay Thompson Day."

[Photo: "Red Desert," Rizzoli, 1964]

Tags: Coraline, French New Wave, Godzilla, Kay Thompson, Milk, Salvador Dalí